


wake up, it's over

by Aerora



Category: Xenoblade Chronicles, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Aegiswap AU, Canon Temporary Character Death, Gen, Roleswap, thanks for just straight up having dreambubbles in your canon xenoblade i appreciate it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 03:27:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16109825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aerora/pseuds/Aerora
Summary: "Try to remember," says the woman, gently.Fiora closes her eyes, and it all comes back.(or, a Pneuma and Ontos roleswap)





	wake up, it's over

Fiora stands alone on a beach.

It's a bright day, the sun catching on the water as it ripples softly in the wake of some unseen school of fish. There's a rustling in the bushes, a few dozen feet away, wind through tiny branches, and Fiora shifts her weight to one foot as she glances up at the strange, spindly trees. Their broad leaves are swaying in the wind, too, and she realizes, watching them, that she can't feel this breeze. The sun must be beating down, but she can't feel that, either—

" _Oh_ ," says a voice from behind her, soft, and she whirls around, trying to find its owner.

There's a hill behind her - closer than she was expecting, and she's not sure why she was expecting one at all - but at the top, on the sandy path down to where Fiora stands, is a woman. It's shady down here (and that's not right, either), but the angle and the sunlight still make it hard to tell more than that her hair is as red as her outfit. At first she thinks that the style - armored but in a way that still looks comfortable, flashes of bright teal standing out against the red and black - reminds her of her family somehow, but then she shakes her head to clear it and remembers that Dunban is her only family, that she's never seen him in armor like this in her life, let alone seen it on anyone else. Fiora frowns at that, reaches back to re-center the butterfly clip in her hair, to re-center her own thoughts along with it.

"Do you… recognize me?" the woman asks, and she must have made her way down the hill while Fiora was lost in her own mind, stopping a few feet away. She still can't make out her expression, but her face…

"I feel like I _should_ ," admits Fiora. The woman's face has something in her aching faint but clear, like someone else's feelings.

"That's about what I expected," she says, and Fiora pauses in case she has any plans of elaborating on that one at all, but no, apparently not. Great. After a moment. she smiles, in a way that Fiora thinks is meant to be reassuring, but it doesn't meet her eyes. "What about where you are?"

Fiora shakes her head. "No," she says. "I was just-" She breaks off, holds her head to cope with the sudden pain in it, the first real thing she's felt. ( _In how long?_ a distant part of her wonders, but she can't answer, couldn't answer even if she knew.)

"Try to remember," says the woman, gently.

Fiora closes her eyes, and it all comes back.

 _Sirens, and ether smoke from ruptured engines, and blood; in the darkness, the screams bounce off the water below and it's impossible to tell where they're coming from. There are mechon everywhere, but she manages to slip past them undetected, Shulk and Reyn distracting them for her_ —

 _The rumble of the artillery under her body as she pilots it, pushes the stick as far as it'll go as she opens fire on the giant mechon, intent on crushing it before it can crush Shulk_ —

 _Her impact with the pavement jarring everything in her, her fruitless struggles to force the vehicle to_ move _already, the cold emptiness of the Mechon's claws ripping through her torso_ —

Her eyes snap open again, lock with those of the woman in front of her. She's not smiling anymore.

If Fiora's dead, that means there's nothing between that mechon and Shulk and Dunban and Reyn but the sword that had almost killed her brother, the one that none of them can even safely wield. Barely anything stopping it from destroying the whole of Colony 9, if it wanted to - the colony's defenses were never meant to tackle that many enemies already in the city.

Something wells up in her and she _screams_ , wordless and miserable, one foot striking out to kick at the sand. It's childish, a part of her thinks, but she's _dead_ ; it's not like she'll get any other chances to express her frustrations.

The woman still hasn't said anything. It's starting to get on Fiora's nerves.

"If I'm dead," Fiora starts, slowly, and her heart sinks at the way her companion looks at her when she says it, "then what are you doing here? What is this place?"

"You're not… quite dead, actually," she says. "It's complicated." Fiora bites back a dry laugh, trying to imagine a _simple_ explanation for only being mostly dead. "You would have died, without intervention," she continues. "To save you, we had to make… some adjustments."

That triggers something - a ripple in the too-still air - and she watches, wordless, as her hands shift from flesh and bone to white and gold metal in front of her. Behind her splayed fingers, Fiora dimly registers that the world is fading out, false sand and water being replaced by a darkness full of softly glowing stars.

"So I'm…" she breathes, not finishing the thought. She turns her hands over, unable to tear her gaze from them.

"Most of your body was replaced with mechanical parts, yes," she says, as matter-of-fact as if she'd been talking about the weather. "The body we chose was meant to be empty," she continues.

That's enough to shake Fiora from her numb horror. " _Ex_ _cuse me_?" she demands, looking up once more. The dim light here illuminates the other strangely, her armor almost glowing itself in places. "Then— the body we  _chose_?" Her offense dispels more of the haze that's been hanging over her since she first remembered what had happened.

It doesn't seem to faze her companion, though. "Meyneth needed a vessel from the Bionis, and someone with such a close tie to the wielder of the Monado" _\- Dunban?_  Fiora almost interrupts, before she remembers how natural Shulk had looked with the Monado in hand - "wasn't an opportunity we could pass up," she says. "I'm sorry we couldn't ask you about it first, but you'd lost too much blood to be awoken." Before she can ask any of the questions burning in her - _a vessel? is that why the colony was attacked? for_ me? - the woman continues. "But that's not why I'm here."

"Then why?" Fiora asks. She clenches one of her new hands into a fist and relaxes it, watches the tiny hinges that have replaced her knuckles fold and unfold.

The woman doesn't answer right away, and she watches her expression shift, her gaze flicking downward for just a moment before locking with Fiora's own. "Do you want to change it?" she asks, and Fiora wonders how she didn't hear the guilt creeping up in her voice sooner, how she's only noticed now that it's all but impossible to miss. She takes a quick breath, opens her mouth to say something, but before she can—

_The edges of everything are covered with a thick fog, thicker even than the kind that rolls in over the lake in Colony 9 sometimes at night that leaves it impossible to see more than a few feet in front of you.  Beyond that fog, though, Fiora sees an open courtyard and a huge spear through the body of a strange giant figure - Shulk, diving from a collapsing platform after a Mechon almost as big as the one that had killed her - herself, hair cut short and body metallic, facing down Mechon with Shulk and Reyn at her side and twin swords in hand—_

For just a moment, before it ends, she sees Shulk one more time, falling from something too blurred by fog to see clearly, his body limp.

She gasps as the vision releases her, presses her hand against her chest hard as her sight returns to normal. (She isn't sure if she can feel a heartbeat. She isn't sure if she wants to know if that's because of the dream or not.) Her knees buckle, unable to hold her weight, and the woman steps closer to her as she collapses to whatever it is she's been standing on all this time. Fiora stares up at her, eyes wide. She's pretty sure she hadn't managed to ask her question out loud, but she gets an answer anyway.

"The future," she says, with a wry little smile. "You're a fluctuation - you shouldn't still be here. So, if you want to change the future…"

"I'll… have more freedom to do it?" Fiora says, is rewarded by a nod.

"Exactly. So, I'll ask you again: Is that what you want?" and she reaches her hand out to Fiora, palm outstretched.

For all the questions in Fiora's mind right now, this was never one of them. "Yes, it is," she says, and takes it to pull herself up.

The world fades to white.

**Author's Note:**

> hi I have a lot of thoughts about this AU, and with any luck that means I'll have more of it to share soon!
> 
> if you'd like to be a witness to Xenoblade slowly but surely causing my death, you can find me on twitter at [@bladecharge](http://www.twitter.com/bladecharge)!


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